{"title":"Blast Books,U.S.","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780922233533","title":"Deaths of Artists","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eStarving Artist Knifed to Death in Village Room… Famous Artist Dies Penniless and All Alone…\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003eDeep in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art are two strange scrapbooks packed with century-old newspaper obituaries of painters, illustrators, sculptors, and photographers, famous and forgotten alike. Somber death notices of luminaries like Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin are preserved on their crumbling pages, side by side with tragic and often grisly stories of obscure artists who met their demise as victims of accident, murder, poverty, and disease. Compiled from 1906 to 1929, the scrapbooks not only memorialize the subjects of these obituaries: they also record graphic and sensationalized news reporting from the heyday of yellow journalism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWho collected the artists’ obituaries? What was their purpose for the Met Museum? Were the scrapbooks assembled in a nod to Giorgio Vasari’s bestselling sixteenth-century magnum opus, \u003ci\u003eLives of the Artists\u003c\/i\u003e, with its hundreds of gossipy artist biographies? When Met Museum archivist Jim Moske chanced upon these fascinating relics forgotten in museum storage, he set out to unravel the mystery of their creation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDelving into Met employee records, Moske discovered the story of Arthur D'Hervilly, an ex-convict and aspiring artist who was hired in 1894 as a museum guard. By the twilight of his museum career, D’Hervilly had risen to assistant curator of paintings. Occasionally, he was also called upon to serve as the Met media officer. It was apparently in this capacity that in the summer of 1906, he decided to order the National Press Intelligence clipping service to send him any and all U.S. newspaper stories about the deaths of artists. By the time he died thirteen years later, he had assembled a massive chronicle of reportage. D’Hervilly’s colleagues dutifully carried on adding to the scrapbooks until 1929, leaving behind more than three hundred pages crammed with thousands of obituaries.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDeaths of Artists\u003c\/i\u003e intertwines D'Hervilly's peculiar biography with heart-wrenching, bizarre, outlandish, and darkly comic stories of artists, both successful and abject. Moske's meticulously researched narrative is illustrated with full-page images of scrapbook pages, details of shocking obituary headlines, paintings and sculptures by the artist-subjects, and unique documents from the Met archives. The deaths of artists, seen in the light of their uncommon lives, add up to much more than just a litany of sad endings. This eerie glimpse into a dark side of art history and creative practice illuminates the unique challenges artists face, exceptional risks they take, and the cruel turns of fate that often thwart their efforts.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295160807797,"sku":"9780922233533","price":28.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780922233533_f8bffa2b-c06a-44bb-a73e-c92f965aba2c.jpg?v=1786016253"},{"product_id":"9780922233526","title":"Walker Evans","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary \u003ci\u003eWisconsin Death Trip\u003c\/i\u003e he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful \"Gay Nineties.\" It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. \"Outside the rooms he inhabited,\" Lesy writes, \"the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage.\" Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that \"the plain truth of the images . . . wasn’t as plain as it seemed,\" Lesy explains. \"Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs.\" Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans’s intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. \"Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime,\" Lesy writes. Evans’s photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy’s telling of Evans’s life stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire and dread, produced the portraits he made in his last years,\" Lesy notes. In the 1970s, Evans became enthralled with the Polaroid SX-70 and its colorful instant images, and he used it to take his last photographs—portraits of people, in extreme close up, and portraits of objects.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women—Walker took pleasure in being alive,\" Lesy writes. \"He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits—these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295547765109,"sku":"9780922233526","price":31.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780922233526_24ff403d-b54c-4229-86ac-73feb468bffe.jpg?v=1786016252"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-blast-booksus.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}